Fukushima Watch: Previous Experiments With Ice Walls

The 1.4-kilometer-long subterranean ice wall that Japan is proposing to create around the damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi may well be the biggest such structure yet, if it’s completed and switched on as planned. But it’s not completely without precedent, as JRT found.

The equipment to make an ice wall twice as long was installed — but never turned on — at a gold mine in Canada. And engineers at the Hanford nuclear-cleanup site in Washington state also considered ground freezing as a way to keep contaminants in groundwater from seeping into the Columbia River, but they abandoned the idea.